Discussion about this post

User's avatar
KattyWren's avatar

Regarding this:

...it is theoretically possible to build a society where every industry is highly competitive, full of thousands of firms that ruthlessly compete against each other, but with all of those thousands of firms being owned by the government.

Isn't that a bit how the various branches of the military and other government programs (thinking specifically of NASA) work now? In that they are all competing against each other for tax dollar allocations and theoretically have to justify their budgets to the public via our representatives in Congress. In a system that was working properly the various government departments would justify their budgets to the public with both innovation and efficiency, and the public - through their elected Congressional representatives - would allocate more money to the branches and departments that had adequately justified their benefit to society. Theoretically. Of course, what actually happens in our dysfunctional system is that our Congressional representatives are more focused on either giving money to departments based in their home districts (pork-barrel spending) or making sure the private businesses that gave the most money to their campaigns are getting the most benefit of government spending rather than the public. Campaign finance changes would go a long way to fixing that particular problem with our democracy.

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts